During a five-minute peak in the UK, 11m people were watching, while the average viewing figure was 9.9m
Saturday night’s Eurovision song contest in Liverpool was the most watched grand final in the competition’s history, the BBC has said.
In the UK, there was a five-minute peak of 11 million people watching and an average viewing figure of 9.9 million, which equates to a 63% TV audience share.
Continue reading...The chatshow host on his new novel, his pride in appearing on RuPaul’s Drag Race and why Ireland is in a sweet spot right now
Broadcaster and author Graham Norton, 58, grew up in County Cork. He moved to London to go to drama school, before becoming a standup comedian. His TV breakthrough was in the sitcom Father Ted. His BBC chatshow began in 2007 and has won five Baftas, while his Virgin Radio show is broadcast on weekend mornings. Norton has commentated on the Eurovision song contest since 2009 and is a judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK. His third novel, Home Stretch, is out in paperback this week.
Home Stretch traces the fallout from a car crash. Was it based on a real-life incident?
It’s based on a whole phenomenon. Every summer in Ireland, there are these crashes of cars with too many young people in them. Sometimes, there might be drink involved, but often it’s just reckless driving and the confidence of youth. Because it’s a much smaller country, these stories make the national news and what I noticed was that often the driver survived. That was my starting point – I thought, what happens to that life? It’s hardly begun but it’s blighted by this awful tragedy.
Rosie O’Donnell, Jimmy Fallon and Graham Norton are just a few of the famous recipients of the ‘Cruise cake’, a white chocolate coconut ring which might as well be a halo
Tom Cruise follows me on Twitter. Until now, I have been relatively proud of this fact, even though he follows tens of thousands of people, and only tweets three times a year, and his account is probably run by his staff, and he wouldn’t actually be able to tell you what Twitter was if you held a gun to his head. Regardless, I was proud.
But now I feel like a failure, because Tom Cruise has never sent me a cake. And it turns out that all Tom Cruise does is send cakes to people. According to Yahoo, every year he orders more than 100 white chocolate coconut bundt cakes from Doan’s Bakery in Woodland Hills, California, and sends them to his famous friends. Rosie O’Donnell gets one. Kirsten Dunst gets one. Jimmy Fallon gets one. James Corden gets one. Graham Norton gets one, and his staff eat it without telling him. Henry Cavill called it “the most decadent, the most amazing cake”. Barbara Walters once ate hers live on television, in a power move as yet unmatched by any mortal human.
Continue reading...BBC chat show presenter explains why he stopped writing advice column
Graham Norton has said he stopped writing for the Daily Telegraph because the newspaper’s recent “toxic” political stances increasingly made him feel “nauseous”.
The BBC One chat show presenter wrote the newspaper’s advice column for 12 years before stepping down without explanation at the end of 2018. Norton has now said he decided to leave the outlet after it defended the likes of US supreme court then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh and published articles by future prime minister Boris Johnson containing falsehoods.
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